Welcome to today's journal.

I was watching an interview with musician Todd Rungren yesterday and I realized about half way through that Todd probably has more friends in Australia than I do. Todd lives in Hawaii so he's even closer to the joint than I am. I don't get it at all. I don't really know what his appeal is, but there he is touring all over the place, livin' large and enjoying life.  The only song of Todd's I vaguely know is the 1978 single "Can We Still Be Friends". The official music video starts with an extreme close up of the Toddster. He's not the handsomest guy around but since when was that a barrier to success? As the camera pulls back it is revealed that Todd is sitting at a grand piano in a room somewhere. He's as skinny as a rake and wearing some kind of animal print tank top. Very fashionable at the time no doubt. After that the camera zooms in on another extreme close up. Why?? He's not a good lookin' guy imo.

So eventually we get to what's called the middle 8 and there's a ballerina dancing atop the grand piano. Not in real life, it was added with some chroma key video wizardry after the fact. The ballerina* looks to be about 10 years old, but's hard to tell. Her performance is brief but enough of a distraction from the fairly pointless double tracked la la la's and mediocre instrumentation which cuts the monotony of the song in half. At about the third go around it's starting to look like a comical sketch a la Saturday Night Live, or better still Second City.  

Exiting from the middle 8 we have more "la la" nonsense, and Todd is now riffing over his chorus. It sounds like Hall and Oats here so I don't know who is aping who at this point. Is he channeling Daryl Hall? It sure sounds like it. "She's Gone" which is what this is reminiscent of came out in '73 so this just sounds like some kind of imitation of what H&O were doing at the beginning of the decade. God, another extreme close up. No, no, nooo! 

The final stanza is not bad. He nails the vocal quite nicely, but then we're back to the dancing pixie on the piano, and it's boring and a lazy take.. We repeat the middle 8 la la la's again with the dancing pixie. At this point the song should fade away gracefully but no, it just keeps-a-rollin.  We're at 3.21 here, it should have finished by now, but it just clangs on to the bitter fade. Todd himself has left a comment on the "Official Video" Youtube page to whit, "Thank you all, are you still listening in 2026?" Quite a few replies from people age checking themselves "I'm 72, I'm 68, I've been listening to you since I was in my 20's etc, etc. It's boomer rock is what it is. Still Todd has quite a following, so good for him. 

Todd played all the instruments on the track and in 1994, the song made a prominent appearance in the film Dumb and Dumber, for which Rundgren had composed the score. As I suspected, Todd is the John Willsteed of boomer pop. (nobody will know who I'm talking about, but these guys l all love writing film scores, which is the easiest thing in the world to do I think) The song was the only hit from Todd's eighth studio album called the Hermit of Mink Hollow, which was recorded at his house on Mink Hollow Road in Lake Hill, New York. Lake Hill is just north of Woodstock, less than an hour away from where I'm writing this.

I lifted this from Wikipedia "With the exception of an occasional visit from engineer Mike Young, Rundgren recorded Hermit of Mink Hollow entirely by himself. He said that recording Mink Hollow alone was a tedious experience, "because the control room was upstairs and the drums downstairs, so when trying to record drums, if I made a mistake, I had to run up and down the stairs just to rewind the machine. I didn't have a remote with a lead that ran long enough!" This could well describe my recording situation right here. The only difference is that I'm using digital equipment and not a tape machine. It makes it a hell of a lot easier.

you can read it all here 

Good Day 

*The woman dancing on the piano is Karen "Bean" Darvin, a ballerina and model. She was in a relationship with Todd Rundgren from around 1977 to 1985, and they had two sons together, Rex and Randy. Their relationship began after she and Bruce Springsteen split, and she's also known for appearing in other Springsteen-related contexts